The present disclosure relates generally to virtual machines, such as virtual machines supported by an operating system. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to providing efficient virtual input/output (I/O) address translation for network interface devices within a virtual machine.
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
A high-performance server network may use virtual machine architecture hosted by a hypervisor. Virtual machines may in turn use virtual memory addresses that are mapped to physical memory addresses to more efficiently use memory space. A memory management unit in a host system may translate the virtual addresses to the physical addresses. The high-performance server network may also use a high-performance network interface device, such as a network interface controller (NIC). When transmitting and receiving data, the data may be transferred between the host system and the NIC. To read outgoing data sent from the host system or write incoming data to the host system, the NIC may request translation of the virtual addresses to access the desired physical addresses. These translation requests may incur latency that may negatively affect network performance.